Archive for August 2011

According to a report in Bloomberg Yelp is scaling back on the sales resources devoted to selling Yelp Deals.

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"Rather than offer more and more deals of inherently declining quality to more and more folks over time, we want to make sure we're only providing good, quality opportunities," Vince Sollitto, vice president of corporate communications, said in an interview. "While we think the deals business is a good one, it has never been a core focus of our offering."

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Here's an anecdote in a Bloomberg piece that sums up some of what's going on with merchants and all the sales calls they're receiving:

Merchants say that participating in the deals often leads to unsolicited calls from other coupon sites. After Kiebpoli Calnek ran a Yelp Deal advertising 50 percent off an aerial performance class in July, she began receiving calls from representatives of Groupon, LivingSocial and other deal sites every day.

"They send me e-mails, they call me, they call me again," said Calnek, who is based in Brooklyn, New York. "I told them, â€˜I'm burnt out from this deal. I have 500 new clients. Why would I want to do another one?'"

Representatives of some large websites-including Yelp, TripAdvisor and WebMD-have complained that Google is attempting to draw more traffic to its new local-business, shopping and health sites, among others, by linking to Google pages above its natural search results. They say that practice gives Google an unfair advantage and siphons away Web traffic and ad dollars.

Google's Maslan said that when "someone searches for a place on Google, we still provide the usual web results linking to great sites; we simply organize those results around places to make it much faster to find what you're looking for."

He added that "at the end of the day, users come first. If we fail our users, competition is just a click away."

Note to Google: You’re failing the users.

Google is like the yellow pages: you get listed no matter what. Google has made a ton of money off of indexing and ranking content (by selling the equivalent of yellow pages display ads). If AT&T all of a sudden decided to open a bunch of restaurants and started leaving off listings of other restaurants, someone would complain.

Based on careful thought about the future direction of Place pages, and feedback we've heard over the past few months, review snippets from other web sources have now been removed from Place pages. Rating and review counts reflect only those that've been written by fellow Google users, and as part of our continued commitment to helping you find what you want on the web, we're continuing to provide links to other review sites so you can get a comprehensive view of locations across the globe.

Sure, it’s their product, but this doesn’t serve the user at all what Google does best — find relevant content on the web. This paragraph is a complete contradiction.

What it really appears is they used “other’s people content” to build a skeleton, and now are trying to grow their own user generated content (with lacklaster results, as the screenshot above proved). This undermines their credibility.

Google has to decide if they’re a search engine/portal or a destination site. If they’re a search engine/portal, they should stay out of the review business.

The title isn’t the title of the article, but should be. Every UX designer (and probably everyone who works for your company) must read this article:

Warren Buffett talks about building a moat around your business to make it untouchable. The strongest moat you can build is one based on strong relationships. Low prices can always be beaten. Stunning design ages quickly and can easily be copied. Impeccable uptime can be matched, and your features copied. However, a good customer relationship is unique, and loyal customers are hard to steal.

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Great experiences are about getting everything right; it goes well beyond fancy sign-up forms, cute mails and game-ified tutorials. Sure, all those things help, but the customer experience has to be comprehensive. Quality is fractal. Your customers will judge your company based on all of the experiences they have with it, not just those dripping with CSS3 effects. Using a touchpoint matrix such as the one above will help ensure that you’re considering all of the experiences your customers will have.

It’s almost never about price, because it’s so hard to change to a competitor (especially in SaaS software environments). If you start making decisions that are contradict what the customers want, you’ll lose them.

Every touch point is important — from features you build to unparalleled customer service.

Pearn Kandola’s chief researcher, a kindly and upbeat psychologist named Stuart Duff, was shocked at the findings. He assumed it would be the quants, the introverts and the shy types who would thrive in a virtual work situation. After all, they’re the ones who keep their heads burrowed in cubicles at work. Turns out it’s the extoverts among us who are better suited to going Bedouin. “The penny really dropped for us,” he says.

Duff and his researcher colleagues found that it’s the employees who chase socialization who thrive in the land of virtual work. The office gabbers. Those who are life of the break-room party. Left on their own, these types of workers are the ones who work closely with clients, chum around with colleagues, and talk it up with bosses. They stay connected no matter where they are. It comes naturally to them.

Matthias Poehm, a former software engineer-turned-public speaking trainer has started — yes — the Anti-PowerPoint Party (APPP) earlier this month. Headquartered in Bonstetten, Switzerland, the APPP calls itself an “international movement” that intends to “decrease the number of boring presentations worldwide.” The goal is to make it so that people who don’t want to use PowerPoint “will not have to justify themselves in the future,” it says.

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The APPP says people who attend “futile” PowerPoint presentations result in almost $500 billion in hourly wage losses for employers worldwide. Instead, APPP says people should consider using flip charts, which it claims are 95 percent more effective than using presentation software.

I think this article is important because many times, user experience professionals have to work to change culture. They also have design web applications that have to spread virally.

If this is really true, this holds all kinds of implications. Do you design applications to appeal to 10 percent of the audience? Do you target smaller groups? Fascinating.

“When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”

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An important aspect of the finding is that the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion does not change significantly regardless of the type of network in which the opinion holders are working. In other words, the percentage of committed opinion holders required to influence a society remains at approximately 10 percent, regardless of how or where that opinion starts and spreads in the society.

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The scientists developed computer models of various types of social networks. One of the networks had each person connect to every other person in the network. The second model included certain individuals who were connected to a large number of people, making them opinion hubs or leaders. The final model gave every person in the model roughly the same number of connections. The initial state of each of the models was a sea of traditional-view holders. Each of these individuals held a view, but were also, importantly, open minded to other views.

Once the networks were built, the scientists then "sprinkled" in some true believers throughout each of the networks. These people were completely set in their views and unflappable in modifying those beliefs. As those true believers began to converse with those who held the traditional belief system, the tides gradually and then very abruptly began to shift.